Ahmed Rashid's bestselling 2000 book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia was used extensively by American analysts in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The Lahore-based journalist and writer has been covering the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan since 1979 and has been an outspoken critic of the Bush Administration in relation to the Iraq war and the neglect he believes this led to in terms of the Taliban.

On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, British war correspondent and author Christina Lamb finds herself back in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul. Christina Lamb is chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times and author of several best-selling books including Our Bodies, Their Battlefield and Farewell Kabul.

Vaccine passports that prove a person's Covid-19 immunisation status are expected to be available from December for New Zealanders who want to travel abroad.  Professor Kim Mulholland is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne Department of Paediatrics, and Professor of Child Health and Vaccinology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is also a member of the World Health Organisation's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE), which advises the WHO on overall vaccine policies and strategies.

For years female country artists in North America have been told by radio programmers that they are the "tomatoes" of an all-male salad. In other words, they are the garnish and their music should be played sparingly. Dr Jada Watson, a professor of musicology at the University of Ottawa, says this attitude leads to a direct impact on the success of songs by female country artists. But despite this, women country artists continue to make songs that could be considered strong feminist anthems - following in the tradition of Loretta Lynn's banned 1975 tune 'The Pill', a track that celebrated the dawn of birth control. Dr Watson has teamed up with Tami Neilson for a special show called 'The F Word', which celebrates a rich songbook of country classics doubling as a tongue-in-cheek expose of gender inequality in country music.

Kim Hill reads out listener feedback on the show.

Space science educator and astrobiologist Haritina Mogosanu returns to Saturday Morning to discuss growing plants in space. Her Seeds in Space programme has involved distributing seeds to more than 100 New Zealand schools, working with JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Formerly based in London, now in lockdown in Auckland, photographer Todd Antony usually travels the reaches of the globe on ambitious commercial and personal projects, racking up numerous international awards in the process. Antony's most recent personal project got a 'best of show' at the August 2021 American Photographic Artists Awards: a series of portraits shot in May of Sierra Leone's Flying Stars amputee football team, a group born out of that country's 1991-2002 civil war.

In his debut book How We Became Human: And Why We Need To Change, Sydney-based philosopher, writer and teacher Tim Dean looks at how we evolved to be moral creatures, and why some of our evolved inclinations are out of step with the modern world.

A controversial law dubbed the 'Heartbeat Bill' has come into effect in the US State of Texas this week after the Supreme Court did not respond to an emergency appeal by abortion providers. The Heartbeat Bill is one of the nation's most restrictive abortion measures, banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy - a point when many women do not know they are pregnant.  Dr Joe Pojman is the founder and executive director of an anti-abortion advocacy group Texas Alliance for Life.

Genetically engineered mosquitoes could be the key to winning the war against malaria, a disease that affects more than 200 million people every year and kills more than 400,000 - many of whom are children. Ethan Bier is a distinguished professor in the section of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC San Diego, and is the head of the Bier Lab - where they focus research on active genetics, developmental patterning, and human disease mechanics.